Brothers in Arms
by hyacinthian
Summary: They enlisted because they believed in honor and duty. They escaped because they believed in grace. AU. [MarkDerek friendship]
1. Luck

Vietnam was hot. But it wasn't the heat that killed you, it was the humidity. Or the grenades. It's on days like these, the quiet ones, that make you think. Sometimes, he squats—he doesn't sit anymore because Vietnam is littered with mines and shit—and looks around. There are nurses here who work with the doctors, and he likes to think that give or take a couple years, he could have been one of the doctors here. But the girls here aren't like the girls at home. They're harder, more masculine. He bites down on his cigarette, letting the smoke waft around him. You almost have to be harder in an environment like this, he thinks. He's not the teenager he was when he came.

Derek and he are still friends. Vietnam hasn't touched that. They enlisted together because they stood for principles like honor and duty. They wanted to help. Vietnam is different than he imagined. It's not full of just the enemy. They don't get bombed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Sometimes it's like that, but not all of the time. He's even learned a little Vietnamese.

But it's on days like these that life sucks. It was a quiet day too. It's always quiet when these things happen. It was just a slight whistling; it could have been the fucking Andy Griffith Show theme song. It wasn't that the explosion was loud. It wasn't loud, it was practically silent. It was the pressure that you felt, the heat that burned you even though you were twenty-five feet away. It was the sight of the tent burning, the red cross flap flickering somewhere in the breeze. "Fuck," he says, and he crawls to his feet. The first thing he does is to check to see if Derek's okay, and then they're running towards the tent, because they were med. students.

The patients who have survived are in worse condition. Some of the nurses have horrible burns, and they don't know what happened to the doctors. They had to have died. Damn VC, he thinks. He and Derek grab whatever they can. He never thought he'd ever do this, but medical supplies are hard to come by. So Derek is treating the wounded and he's rummaging through the clothes of all the dead medical personnel he can find, and throws whatever he finds at Derek. Gauze. Bandages. Antiseptic. Anything.

They fix them up as best as they can and wait for the chopper. He squats and smokes a cigarette, lighting it on a shrub along the brush that's caught fire. He squats next to Derek and they talk. "Goddamn," he says, breathing the calming smoke. If he closes his eyes, he almost sees bars in New York, pollution in LA, the goddamn United States.

"Tell me about it," Derek says. He thinks they could be in high school, if it weren't for the bombs and the choppers and the guns.

"VC," he says. "Hit up our goddamn med. tent."

"I know." There's nothing to say anymore except "goddamns" and "I knows" because war is all about this. It's about knowing what you need to know half a second too late, but expecting yourself to know it anyway. It's about heaving loads, the physical, the spiritual, the memories of home, and letting yourself trek through a foreign land carrying all of that and still expecting to survive. It's about napalm and Agent Orange and guerilla warfare. It's about New York and girlfriends and alcohol.

Their CO tells them to pack up their things, that they have to move. Sometimes he likes to think of the people in charge as his parents, directing troops one way or another, and guessing where the VC are hiding. But they're fighting on enemy turf, and chances aren't good. He takes another puff off the cigarette and tosses it on the ground, stubbing it out with his boot. He heaves up his pack, feels his shoulders lurch forward, and falls into the pack. Derek follows him.

War is such a crock, he thinks. You think about honor and duty and fighting for your country when you go off, and when you get there, it's about killing the enemy and staying alive. He tries not to think about the odds or what he would've been doing back home if he had never enlisted. He just smokes a cigarette and squats in the grass. He hasn't killed a man yet. Derek did.

He remembers it too. Sometimes, he squats in the grass and tries not to think about how Derek was before the war. How he was before the war. It's too sad, he thinks. That day had been quiet too. Some VC had wandered away from his troop and had been meandering through the fields. He found himself opposite Derek. Derek who wanted to save lives. Derek who used to smile a lot. Derek who had pulled the pin and lobbed the grenade before the other guy had. Derek who had watched the man half-smile before the grenade exploded at his feet. Derek who had stared at the body for a half an hour before moving. Derek who stopped smiling. He tries not to think about that Derek.

They march through Vietnam, stepping on grass and shit and trying to avoid mines. Mark never killed a man, but he saw a man die. And he doesn't know if killing is worse or if they're both the same. Either way, he thinks with a smile, it fucks a man up. They're marching through and Frank LeBouche, a twenty-year-old from Texas, grins at him one minute when something flies from the field. It lands by his feet. Smiling one minute, flesh and bones the next. Mark forgets if he had gotten blood on his shoe. So they all drop to the ground and start shooting. They shoot at the field. He stares at the grass blowing in the wind as he empties his magazine. There's no one there, he thinks. Hopeless, he thinks.

Two weeks later, and he's writing a letter to Addison. He doesn't know why. She's Derek's girlfriend, but he needs a friend. Someone other than Derek. He doesn't remember what happened. Derek who killed a man and never smiled and Mark who watched a man die and realizes it's a lost cause. His thoughts fly from his brain to the ballpoint pen, and it's messy and convoluted, and he's pretty sure it doesn't make sense. He's pretty much just babbling, but he needs to babble. And in the end, in the last sentence, he asks for a small picture of her because he could use a little luck.

Some of the guys have religion. Some have girlfriends. He doesn't even have family.


	2. Life

Chapter II: Life

In Vietnam, only one thing is certain: you're alive until you're not. It's like a game really, and they teach you to think of it like one. Basically, you've got one shot in this game. Your goal is to survive until the end. That's all you have to do: survive. It sounds easier than it actually is.

He and Derek don't subsist off of much. They eat their MREs like good little soldier boys and clean their guns and smoke some cigarettes. Sometimes it gets too much and he goes off into the bush and pukes. Derek follows him. They never tell anyone. They just don't say anything. Learn to survive.

As a med. student trying to become a doctor, he thinks of life on a linear scale. You live until you don't. As a doctor, the goal is to try and get a person to stay on the "life" side. Even if they've already crossed over, you've got defibrillators, scalpels, your own hand covered with a thin barrier of latex. Anything to try and keep them alive. In Vietnam, you have guns. Lots and lots of guns. He knows a lot of the guys have their own little bits of superstitions. John Baker from Ohio kisses his crucifix before he starts firing. Terrell Waite rubbed his little four-leaf clover charm. As a doctor, you learn about coping mechanisms. When you're in the belly of the beast, there's nothing but coping mechanisms. You try not to identify them. You end up going crazy.

The doctor who had been killed was immediately replaced. The old doctor was Christopher Jacobson. He had experience in the field, knew what he was doing, and knew when to give you morphine or an M&M. He was smart and he and Derek had respected that. The new doctor was Michael Hayden, and he was their age. He looked lily-white all the time and he didn't know what he was doing half the time. He looked jumpy and nervous. They all made fun of him. They called him a pansy.

One day, when they were patrolling through My Khe, they got hit with a patch of enemy fire. So they did what they were supposed to. They dropped, whipped out the guns, and fired at whatever they could. If he closes his eyes, he can still see it, hear it, feel it. He can still feel the way the gun vibrated in his hands, hear the shouts of a language he didn't understand and the shouts of pain he understood all too well, see the stars that flicker beneath his eyes, the sparks of flying casings and spent magazines. He gets shot that day. It was nothing serious.

The bullet lodged in his shoulder. He can still feel it, the pulsing of his blood beneath his skin. The pain that he felt seems so distant now, and even seemed distant then. He had felt pain without feeling pain. Just the same pulsing beneath his skin of his heart trying to keep him alive. He pressed his palm against the wound, feeling the blood stain his hands, and returned, changing out the magazine and firing some more. He heard the yelp of the bastard who shot him.

He did kill someone that day.

Derek had gotten shot that day too. Nothing lodged, just a graze against the arm. It was a wound nonetheless. So they had gone over to the med. tent, the red cross flap flickering in the wind. He saw it burnt amongst rubble, but he shook the image out of his head. That doctor, Michael Hayden, shook so bad that he couldn't even hold the scalpel correctly. Derek pushed him out of the way and headed towards the tray of tools. He picked up the scalpel.

"Mark," he said.

"Yeah."

"This is going to hurt like a bitch."

So he gritted his teeth and said the only thing he could think of. "I know."

And Derek sat next to him, performing impromptu surgery on him, until he got the bullet out. He treated Hayden like a nurse, demanding gauze and antiseptic, but he fixed Mark himself. The other soldiers in the tent hooted but he didn't care. Friends don't let friends get gangrene because an idiot's operating. So Derek turned to him, his blood still staining the scalpel, and handed it to him.

"Fix me," he had said. He had laughed at the time. He wasn't laughing now. How do you fix something you can't even see?

Life was such a precious commodity in Vietnam. You never knew when you were going to get bombed or shot. The whole goddamn country was like a mist. It surrounds you and confuses you until you don't know where you're going and why you were going there. Like an anaconda, it wraps around you. When you least expect it, you're lying on the ground, your throat constricted and bruised with petechiae. It's like a bad crime drama.

Back then, mines were different. It wasn't so much stepping on them that killed you. It was moving once you stepped on them. Bouncing Betties, they called them. A girl you'd never want to tumble with, they laughed. When you first get to a town or a village, you separate. You break apart and fan out and try to establish some kind of perimeter because that's just what you do. He did that one day. Derek did it too. They stayed relatively close even though they were supposed to be separate. He and Derek always did have issues with that. He stepped on one. And Derek looked at him.

And time stopped.

And Derek stopped.

And he stopped.

Stopped breathing, stopped thinking, stopped laughing. He just started praying. He was never religious or superstitious, but he prayed that day to God, Buddha, some kind of benevolent force. Derek looked at him with sad eyes that day.

"Mark," he said.

"Don't say it, Derek." He stops and tries to smile. "Self-fulfilling prophecy, right?" He takes a breath. "I'm going to get out of here with at least one functioning leg. I'm not going to die."

"You're not going to die."

"Right."

"Right."

"Mark."

"Derek, please."

"I just—you're my best friend." He stops. "I don't know what I'd do if you died."

"Hold a funeral. Send me back home." He pauses, and casts Derek a meaningful look. "Don't beat yourself up for my death."

"Yeah."

"I'm serious, Derek."

"I know you are."

"Okay." He takes a deep breath. "On the count of three, I'm going to jump and hope I'm not too badly wounded."

Derek turns his head away. Mark can hear his sharp intake of breath. "Okay." He thinks of future children, of future wives, of lost chances. _Legs, _he thinks. _I've known you a long time. I love you very much. Please, please. I don't want to lose one of you or both of you. _He closes his eyes and jumps.

The Bouncing Betty just clicks.

Denny Howard, from Oklahoma, smiles at him. "You're one lucky son-of-a-bitch."

Mark closes his eyes. "You're telling me."

He leans on Derek the whole way back. He can't feel his legs. He's too grateful. Derek doesn't even look at him. He knows why. If that had happened to Derek, he's not sure he would've been able to look at Derek then. It's too emotional. And if he had really died, or been wounded, he wonders what would've happened. He looks at Derek and wonders if he would've sacrificed his dream of becoming a doctor.

They sit there, having eaten their disgusting MREs, squatting in the grass, smoking cigarettes. "Jared has pot," Derek says.

"Would you really smoke it?"

"No."

"I didn't think you would."

"I'd like to think I would."

"Why?"

"It makes you forget." Derek closes his eyes and he can see the burden that the war is taking on him. More and more is falling on his shoulders and as his best friend, he wants to stop it. He wishes he could take that burden on for himself, but he can't. And what is Vietnam but lost wishes? "I killed a man, Mark."

"So did I."

"What happened to do no harm and all of that?"

Mark laughs bitterly. "I guess that oath only applies to your country of origin." He pauses. "It's war, Derek. It's kill or be killed."

"I know." He puffs on his cigarette, and stares at the burning end, flicking ashes into the dirt. "It's a shitty way to live."

Mark pauses, casting his cigarette into the grass with a practiced flick. He stands. "At least you're living."


	3. Love

Part III: Love

Vietnam is a love and hate relationship for him, he thinks. There's the love part with all the joy and beauty. There's the grandeur of the country and the simplicity of life and the friendliness of many villagers. There's the way some of the nurses smile at him, and the way he flirts back. It almost feels like normal. There's the brotherly love: the bonding between all of them, the way they have to cling on to some—well, _any _kind of camaraderie they can because they need it. It's a coping mechanism. There's the way Derek will tell an old dirty joke to him over breakfast, and he'll laugh, a deep chortle that comes straight from the belly, like he hasn't heard it a thousand times before (which he has).

There's the hate part with all the war and the blood and violence. There's the fact that no one's really cheerful or happy. Even the nurses put on loads of blush on their cheeks. It's almost as if their bodies are defunct, like their bodies can't produce happy flushes of color anymore. He watches the nurses with their fake rouged up cheeks of happiness tell a soldier about hope, tell him about home, sing him a lullaby, tears in their eyes. His whole goddamn right leg's almost blown apart, but they have no more morphine, so they just sing and cry.

Sometimes, the nurses will grab at his hand and recite some kind of prayer. He wonders if there's even room in his heart for that kind of love anymore. He knows that a lot of people cling to it, that blind faith and love, and know that it will see them through to tomorrow. He can't see it happening to him. It feels like all that's left of him is blood and flesh and hatred and killing. One time, he stole a scalpel from a med. tent, and sat in the grass with Derek, the warm breeze floating over them.

He cut a small line on the top of his arm, and watched a small red line form. Derek had just stared. He didn't even say anything. But he could sense it, and he knew that Derek understood. Best friends or not, they were _brothers_. They were brothers before they had even enlisted, but they were even more so now. So Derek stared off into the waving grass, and he sat there, holding the scalpel handle, the blade dirty with the rusty color of his blood.

A breeze whistled through the trees.

"I just—I needed some kind of proof to feel alive again, you know?" Derek just nods. "Goddamn, Derek. I needed to see that I still bled like a normal human being. I needed to know that I wouldn't bleed silver—that I hadn't become this complete killing machine."

Derek clears his throat, and answers. "I know," he says, gruffly. "Goddamn, Mark. Sometimes it feels like we're too old."

He stares wistfully out into the waving grasses. "I know," he whispers. There's a long pause, and a rumble of thunder tumbles from cloud to cloud within the small village. _Too bad_, he thinks. _It was so sunny just a second ago._ "Like we're termites or something, waiting to be exterminated." _If that's not a metaphor for Vietnam, I don't know what is. _

One day, he grabs a nurse and goes in the grasses. There's nothing romantic about it. He bites and she scratches and they kiss without kissing, and it's dirty and messy and ugly. _Just a bit like Vietnam_, he thinks. Maybe they've all become part of the country. She grips at his shoulders and he pulls at her hips. When they finish, he zips up his pants, and she buttons her blouse and straightens her skirt, and they're back to normal. Just two normal people escaping the madness of war. She starts to sob. He doesn't say anything. He just lights a cigarette.

She reaches for it, and takes a long drag. She hands it back.

"Goddamn," he says.

"Fucking right too," she says.

He starts to laugh. "That was the best and the worst sex I've ever had."

She giggles. "Yeah." She starts to sob again, and she reaches blindly for the cigarette. He takes one last selfish, greedy pull before handing it over. "God, I wish it was over."

"What?" He mumbles around the cigarette.

"This whole mess," she says. "I wish this whole goddamn mess was over."

"Don't I know it."

"I should have just become a soldier."

"I don't think they would have let you."

"Fuck that."

"Goddamn." He takes a pull off the cigarette, and holds it out to her, an offering. She shakes her head. "You swear like a sailor."

"Got to," she says. "There's no getting around it. You need to in Hell. There's so much fire around anyway, why wouldn't you?"

"Where you from?"

He stares up at the sky, just whispering words, and listening for whispers back. "Does it matter?"

"Guess not."

"I'm from Oklahoma."

He laughs. "Everyone and their brother is from Oklahoma."

She makes a sound low in her throat. "Where are you from?"

"From everywhere," he says.

"What a cop out."

"Why were you crying before?"

"Sorry about that," she says, as she reaches for the cigarette. "I didn't mean to be so emotional and clingy." He's never heard a woman apologize for that in his lifetime. Well, not without having it be some sort of weird reverse-psychology bullshit, anyway.

"What happened? Your boyfriend die?" She mumbles something that resembles a yes. It's always that the boyfriends die. And the nurses always just patch soldiers up with a lullaby and a prayer, and maybe even a crucifix in the palm, if they're lucky. There's so much floating around in the water, but all the pieces are too small to support yourself on. It's like trying to cling to a notebook for buoyancy. It's not going to work.

"Isn't that how it always works?"

"Yeah. All the men die."

"The good men."

"The bad ones too."

"Aren't they all good in the end?"

"It's not fighting for a glorious cause."

"I know." Tears start to leak from the corners of her eyes. She wipes at them angrily. "Goddamn." He stares at the sky, the clouds looking the same here and at home. "You come here and you think you can make a difference. You come here and you think maybe you can help some poor soldier. What a bunch of shit. Everyone ends up dying anyway."

"Aren't you the cheerful nurse?"

"There was a soldier came in today, his name was Jonas Browning." She sniffles, and pats herself down for a cigarette, his long ago flicked into the grass. "He was so young. Came in, his left leg almost blown to bits. Stepped on a Betty. We didn't have any painkillers left."

"Jesus."

"Can't you see it?" she whispers, something disarming solemn in her voice. "This poor little boy, from Ohio or someplace small, and he comes to fight for a glorious cause. Gets his left leg blown off by a Betty and we don't even have any Tylenol to give the kid. So we—three of the nurses and me—we just grab his hands, and we sing Amazing Grace and Mary Had a Little Lamb and all this other shit we can think of, and he starts crying. He's crying for his mother and his family, and just—goddamn. He was just like my little brother."

"Shit," he says. "It's Vietnam." She gets up, fixes her skirt, leans in to kiss him politely on the cheek, and heads back towards camp.

"Thanks for the cigarette."

"No problem." At mail call, he gets a letter from Addison that night.

She writes to him about what she's doing to fight the war, and how she's fighting for them both. She's fighting so that they can come home. He appreciates it, he really does, because Addie's so sweet and so young. He just doesn't know how he'll fit once he gets back home. He'll be trying to squeeze into different shoes. It just won't work. And he'll have Derek, but what are they going to do? They'll just sit at home and imagine holding machine guns in their hands again, quick-changing magazines, fucking women in the grass. Women that don't matter. Not women like Addie. Not women that love them. Just women. Goddamn women.

He writes something back. He's not sure it makes sense at all, but he tries to keep the pages together, and rereads every so often, making sure to keep his handwriting legible. He writes about Jonas for some reason, writes about the young ones that come to fight out of some manipulated sense of duty, and never end up going back home the same. He writes about the ones that get so easily corrupted by the government or by some force in their lives.

He tries not to write about himself.

He writes about Derek, and writes about how sometimes they sit in the grass and they cut their arms and legs with scalpels. He writes about how she could do a paper on this whole phenomenon. Goddamn coping mechanisms and how they don't actually help you to cope with anything at all. He wants her to do something, to come here, to live through it with them, but he knows that she won't. It's Addison, and he knows her too well.

He signs his letter, "With love." What else is there to say?


	4. Hope

Hope is such a fragile thing in Vietnam - like the rice paper the women use there for rolls (just tap lightly with water, don't drench, never drench). They sit sometimes and people watch, the wild grasses rubbing lightly against their knees. Villagers with slanted-eyes sitting in the sunlight, dipping their prepared spring rolls into fish sauce, biting fiercely into delicate flesh, tearing and gnashing with white teeth. Sometimes they close their eyes against it. Sometimes... Sometimes, they see too much.

They pass through villages like frogs jumping lilypads - always brief, fast, just quick enough to avoid sinking in, avoid the inevitable collapse. They sit in silence when they eat most of the times, but lately, Derek's taken to talking. Mostly, it's just meaningless ramblings, something to get their minds off of just how long they've been here, how long they have yet to go. Like that old poem. Miles to go before they sleep. Except they never sleep. They just lie in the dark, soaking up the night like worn sponges, hoping that peace lasts, that day never comes (it fails them but they never stop).

The end is coming, though, this they know. They can feel it buzzing in the air like the thousands of mosquitos that swarm upon them at night. Tension - it's so thick that sometimes they suffocate. Poor Bill Henry who went to bed one night and woke up the next morning with his eyes wide open and a knife in his throat. Derek closed his eyes then at the sight, and Mark had just set a heavy hand on his bicep; Derek sighed. "Geniohyoid," he said.

"Mylohyoid," Derek replied. Like Laurel and fucking Hardy.

Derek takes to talking about what he's going to do the minute he steps a foot in America. "I have this ring, Mark, and fuck, you should see it. And the minute we get back, I'm going to go to Addie and I'm going to ask her to marry me."

Mark huffed out a laugh then, pulled out a cigarette, and stuck it in his mouth. "Sounds like you need to get all the celebrating done here in good old 'Nam before she marries you." He grabs a nurse by the shoulders, and goes, "Have you met Derek?" Derek laughs and the nurse laughs and he laughs - it feels a bit too contrived for him, but sometimes, it feels like home. The hiss of his lighter draws him back to reality as their CO tells them to pack up and head out.

It bleeds together, all the days - blood spilled and blood never touched is all the same to him. Water runs like blood in his head, and it's all a mess and sometimes, Derek takes his hand and they look at each other and exchange their mutual burdens. "You can talk to me," Derek says.

"I know," he replies. And all in all, everyone has their own individual burdens to bear.

They hit a small skirmish on their way and they drop to their elbows and knees, firing away while the bright midday sun beams down on their dried, cracked skin. But the VC are like rats in a woodpile, scattered within their numerous tunnels underground. They're outflanked, and after an hour, the hope of victory becomes hoping to escape with more than two dozen men alive.

Mark gets a shot to the chest - his pack and gear help him through it and Derek gives a studied glance over and determines that it hasn't hit anything important (god, if ever med school was for anything). Mark, for his part, just grunts a hoarse, "God-fucking-damn," before firing back at the shapeless masses that seem to surround them.

Afterwards, they stand together huddled in the med tent, surrounding themselves with people and familiarity and chaos because everything that just happened was - he can't even quantify it. Derek grabs a scalpel, waiting patiently as Mark unbuttons his uniform and shows where the bullet splintered through his armor to hit him. Derek shoots him a look (sorry there's no morphine) before he starts digging. Mark clenches his fists, his jaw, but he eventually hears the distinct clang of metal in a pan. "You got it?" he asks.

"You're fucking lucky." Derek wraps him up afterwards (he hears the soft noise of a faded movie cliche; we take care of our own) and the white gauze stands in stark contrast to his flesh. He wheezes a little when he breathes (the lungs are fragile like that).

One Friday night on base, they spend the night playing Scrabble. Derek jokes that he'll lighten up because it would be mean to beat an invalid. Mark chuckles. They spell out words like "blood" and "battle" and sometimes Derek will scratch at his chin (i haven't shaved in ages) and sometimes Mark will cheat, but Derek lets it slide. The only noise is the sound of the small wooden pieces hitting the board. In the end, Derek's last word is "sacrament" and Mark's last word is "dirge." It's easy to see who the optimist is. Derek treats Mark to an ice cream cone.

"And maybe we'll get Armani suits for the groomsmen."

"Yeah."

"White tuxes are out of style, right?"

"They went out with the '40s."

"Just checking." They busy themselves with idle chatter while they expect to hear the roar of artillery outside, the clinks of shells hitting the ground, someone feeding a machine gun rows of - gunpowder spilling a trail like the Morton salt girl. It's all fading in their minds - they have to rely on each other for sanity. It's all a little dizzying.

Derek seems to sense his thoughts. "Cigarette?"

Mark huffs out a laugh. "Thought you'd never fucking ask."

They sit on the cracked earth and stare out at the countryside as they light up their cigarettes. "You feeling all right?" Derek's trying to fight the little voice inside of him that still believes itself to be a doctor, a tiny ringing within him that hates the idea of Mark smoking a cigarette following such immediate pulmonary trauma. Mark blows smoke rings idly.

"Feeling fine."

"Jared still have the--"

"Jared died."

"Yeah?"

Mark bites back a bitter laugh. "Benny stole all his pills. And his weed."

"And Benny?"

"Got shot in the head a couple days ago. Used all his stash up, though."

"Well." Mark tries to remember a distant time when they were truly carefree and happy, summers spent at the beach with Derek's family, words wasted in harmless flirtation or jokes - words that now seem so precious, a commodity. They don't waste them anymore.

"How's Addie?"

"I don't hear from her much, but uh, she says she's doing fantastic. Fighting for us to come home."

He chuckles, a false, fleeting thing. "It's hard to imagine Addie becoming a protester."

"She says you wrote to her."

"I did." Derek's eyes flash with something intangible, but Mark shakes it off. He slings an arm around Derek's shoulder and they sit and watch the sunset, casting off their cigarette stubs with a careless flick of the fingers. 


End file.
